Thursday, May 07, 2009

I’m back and with only 914 emails in my in-box at work. I have blisters on my feet from walking everywhere in London for five or six hours on Monday, and then two hours more Tuesday between yet another BBC interview (this time for “The Strand,” on the BBC World Service) and lunch with friends. I had a great time & want to thank everyone, especially Tony Trehy & Carol Watts for making this fun as well as easy.

My single favorite comment of the entire trip came from a woman the night I read (for all of two minutes) as part of Geof Huth’s performance for the opening of the Signs of the Times exhibit at the Bury Art Gallery. “Are you Ron Silliman of the famous blog?” she asked. I allowed that I was. “I’ve read you for years,” she said. “I didn’t realize you were real.”

Other Books in Print

Memoirs & Collaborations

Criticism

Anthology

Ron Silliman was born in Pasco, Washington, although his parents stayed there just long enough for his mother to learn that one could step on field mice while walking barefoot through the snow to the outhouse, and for his father to walk away from a plane crash while smuggling alcohol into a dry county. Silliman has written and edited over 30 books, most recently Revelator from BookThug, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 14 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize,from the Poetry Foundation. His sculpture Poetry (Bury Neon) is permanently on display in the transit center of Bury, Lancashire, and he has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley, although he now lives in Chester County, PA. In 2015, Silliman taught at Haverford College & theUniversity of Pennsylvania & was writer in residenceat the Gloucester Writers Center.